On thinking thoughts, and how un-alien science fiction can be

[hawkwing_lb]

Because I am too sleepy to turn this into a post with actual paragraphs:

hawkwing_lb (23:04:19): Possibly this is a thought brought on by the last vestiges of cold medicine.
hawkwing_lb (23:04:57): but it occurs to me that there are many alien worlds or world-experiences very close at hand.
stillnotbored (23:05:30): there are indeed
hawkwing_lb (23:06:02): and for all the vaunted sensawunda of science fiction, most of it is very conservative when dealing with 'alienness,' and even more conservative in dealing with human people.
cristalia (23:07:38): That sounds like a thought worth chasing.
stillnotbored(23:07:50): it does
hawkwing_lb (23:08:02): I mean, I think I can count on the fingers of one hand the recent science fiction novels I've read where people are less strange to me than the Nigerian immigrants who have church service in the local community centre of a Sunday.
tanaise (23:09:10): Liz, that's basically why I always think of my stuff as SF.
tanaise (23:09:36): because it's not this culture, so it is 'the other' and SF is about 'the other'
hawkwing_lb (23:10:18): (I mean, their experience of life is different to mine in ways I can hardly begin to imagine. For starters, they come from somewhere warm. And the congregation sings in church, all of them, every Sunday)
tanaise (23:11:09): Yeah. Sociological SF is part of the sf that gets most overlooked , I notice.
hawkwinglb (23:11:13): or to pick another example, I have read science fiction novels where the people were less strange to me than some of the people I went to school with
stillnotbored (23:11:51): you should chase that for sure
hawkwing_lb (23:12:04): (and certainly less strange to me than my good friend from Tallaght whose best friends all go to art school.)
hawkwing_lb (23:12:55): this is as far as my chasing goes, tonight.

So, does anyone have any thoughts on this? Because I'm fairly sure I'm not imagining the lack of strangeness in SF, or at least, the SF I've read recently.

Comments

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

Yes, this sounds so much like character-driven SF (hey davefreer, sound familiar?). You have read Slowtrain, right?

Any human group viewed by an outsider is SFnal enough to be valid as First Contact. Perhaps a touch of Margaret Mead, although she may well be discredited with respect to her conclusions; or perhaps that incredible woman who wrote about Shakespeare in the bush?

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

I've read it. (Note, in no way am I saying I dislike the SF I've been reading recently. It just seems so very...limited, and limiting.)

Any human group viewed by an outsider is SFnal enough to be valid as First Contact. Yes, that. Although I'd say 'Almost any', myself. But that's because I've mostly been trained out of making absolute statements. :P

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

:-)

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

What direction of "alien" are you looking for ? The thing that struck me as most convincingly alien in recentish SF was the various cognitive weirdnesses of the characters in Blindsight, frex, which I would highly recommend modulo it being the bleakest thing ever. Also, have you tried any Caitlin Kiernan ?

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

I thought Blindsight did people very well. I do not know that I'd ever read another of his books, but it was well done. And I've seen 'alien' and people-who-are-not-like-us done very well in a lot of fantasy.

But it's something I've noticed particularly in science fiction - Tobias Buckell, Elizabeth Bear, Alastair Reynolds and perhaps one or two others aside - the problem of varieties of peoples and varieties of worlds and varieties of ways of looking at worlds (this last especially) is approached very conservatively.

I suppose you could say that I am looking for a more anthropological approach to people in my modern science fiction, and not be too far off. But it seems that so many science fiction books are populated with characters who see the world very similarly to your average moderately liberal denizen of modern North America. And this seems to me to be quite unnecessarily limiting.